Distributism, AI, and Leo XIV
I spent some time today thinking about Distributism in the concept of AI. I came to this topic as I learned more about Pope Leo XIV’ views on AI and his economic views as represented in his decision to select his papal name as Leo (specifically the connections to Leo XIII) and Leo XIV’s first formal address to the College of Cardinals which focused on how the Catholic Church should respond to AI
Leo XIV is drawing on his namesake predecessor's Encyclical Rerum Novarum where Leo XIII offers an economic theory which came to be know as Subsidiarity through an attempt to craft a middle course between capitalism and socialism that privileges the family as the core unit of economic life and takes the view that we have moral obligations as economic actors. Subsidiarity then came to be articulated over time as Distributism (see the work of G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc)
The question for me becomes - If Distributism has value, how do Distributist principles map onto current debates about and uses of AI? I had a conversation with ChatGPT and landed on the concept of Digital Distributism - did some more digging (old school google search) and found a nice set of Medium essays from Douglas Rushkoff on Digital Distributism (scroll down the list of posts to Aug 6, 2022) - better yet here’s a video from Rushkoff explaining his thoughts about digital distributism.
Back to my interaction with GPT - this is what we came up with.
A modern Distributist might advocate for data cooperatives, open-source software ecosystems, or platform cooperativism—digital equivalents of small associations of thinkers (guilds) where contributors are also stakeholders. Human intellectual effort is distributed in our digital outputs and co-owned or open sourced in those environments. Thus, we own our efforts and through common efforts we are able to generate digital stuff that has value. Our “land” in this new economic world are the platforms where we do our work and our work is with the data we manipulate, the code we write, the programs and solutions we engineer.
This all poses some pretty big issues for the application of Distributism.
Distributism in the digital age may require us to:
Shift from material to immaterial property.
Reclaim the moral value of intellectual labor.
Reimagine guilds and cooperatives in the platform economy.
Assert human authorship and ownership in collaboration with AI.
Perhaps Distributism has lost its usefulness, but Pope Leo XIV may have more to say about this. From his first address to fellow Cardinals.
I chose to take the name Leo XIV. There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour.
It will be interesting to watch these theories (secular and religious) develop over the next few years.